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    Cavendish experiment with fast radio bursts on cosmological scales

    Shuren Zhou1,2,3,4,* and Pengjie Zhang2,1,3,4,†

    • 1Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
    • 2School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
    • 3Key Laboratory for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (MOE)/Shanghai Key Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology, Shanghai 200240, China
    • 4State Key Laboratory of Dark Matter Physics, Shanghai 200240, China

    • *Contact author: zhoushuren@sjtu.edu.cn
    • †Contact author: zhangpj@sjtu.edu.cn

    Phys. Rev. D 113, 103516 – Published 11 May, 2026

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/7f88-crpw

    Abstract

    A key measure of gravity is the relation between the Weyl potential Ψ+Φ and the matter overdensity δm, encapsulated as an effective gravitational constant Glight for light motion. Its value, along with possible spatial and temporal variations, is essential for probing physics beyond Einstein gravity. However, the absence of an unbiased proxy for δm prevents the direct measurement of Glight. In this work, we show that, within a theoretical framework respecting the weak equivalence principle, the dispersion measure (DM) of localized fast radio bursts (FRBs) serve as a good proxy for δm. We further propose an FRB-based estimator FG to directly measure Glight, combining galaxy-DM of localized FRBs and galaxy-weak lensing cross-correlations. With a conservative cut k≤0.1h/Mpc, the measurement can achieve a precision of ≲10%105/NFRB over ten equal-width redshift bins at z≲1. The major systematic error, arising from the clustering bias of electrons traced by the FRB DM, remains subdominant at the 5% level. It can be further mitigated to the ≲1% level, based on the gastrophysics-agnostic behavior that the clustering bias of total baryons (ionized diffuse gas, stars, neutral hydrogen, etc.) approaches unity at sufficiently large scales. Therefore, FRBs shed light on gravitational physics across spatial and temporal scales spanning 20 orders of magnitude.

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